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Albidev
Albidev

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Your User Count Is a Lie

And it’s not a bug. It’s your model.


You open two dashboards.

One says 847k users.

The other says 612k.

That gap? It’s not noise.

It’s structural error.


The real problem

Identity systems fail in two ways:

  • inflate users
  • merge different people into one

Most teams catch the first.

The second is worse. It silently corrupts everything.


Why this happens

You’re using a relational model to represent something that isn’t relational.


sql
SELECT DISTINCT user_id FROM events
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